Chapter 1 of 8 · 3834 words · ~19 min read

Part 1

CAPTAIN CRAIG

A Book of Poems

EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

SECOND EDITION.

[Illustration: Publisher’s Colophon]

Boston and New York HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & COMPANY _The Riverside Press, Cambridge_ 1903

_Published October, 1902_

CONTENTS

PAGE

CAPTAIN CRAIG 1

ISAAC AND ARCHIBALD 85

THE RETURN OF MORGAN AND FINGAL 103

AUNT IMOGEN 108

THE KLONDIKE 115

THE GROWTH OF “LORRAINE” 121

THE SAGE 123

ERASMUS 124

THE WOMAN AND THE WIFE 125

THE BOOK OF ANNANDALE 127

SAINTE-NITOUCHE 150

AS A WORLD WOULD HAVE IT 159

THE CORRIDOR 163

CORTÈGE 164

THE WIFE OF PALISSY 166

TWILIGHT SONG 169

CAPTAIN CRAIG

I doubt if ten men in all Tilbury Town Had ever shaken hands with Captain Craig, Or called him by his name, or looked at him So curiously, or so concernedly, As they had looked at ashes; but a few-- Say five or six of us--had found somehow The spark in him, and we had fanned it there, Choked under, like a jest in Holy Writ, By Tilbury prudence. He had lived his life, And he had shared, with all of humankind, Inveterate leave to fashion of himself, By some resplendent metamorphosis, Whatever he was not. And after time, When it had come sufficiently to pass That he was going patch-clad through the streets, Weak, dizzy, chilled, and half starved, he had laid Some nerveless fingers on a prudent sleeve And told the sleeve, in furtive confidence, Just how it was: “My name is Captain Craig,” He said, “and I must eat.” The sleeve moved on, And after it moved others--one or two; For Captain Craig, before the day was done, Got back to the scant refuge of his bed And shivered into it without a curse-- Without a murmur even. He was cold, And old, and hungry; but the worst of it Was a forlorn familiar consciousness That he had failed again. There was a time When he had fancied, if worst came to worst, And he could work no more, that he might beg Nor be the less for it; but when it came To practice he found out that he had not The genius. It was that, and that was all: Experience had made him to detect The blunder for his own, like all the rest Of him. There were no other men to blame. He was himself, and he had lost the speed He started with, and he was left behind. There was no mystery, no tragedy; And if they found him lying on his back Stone dead there some sharp morning, as they might,-- Well, once upon a time there was a man-- _Es war einmal ein König_, if it pleased him. And he was right: there were no men to blame: There was just a false note in the Tilbury tune-- A note that able-bodied men might sound Hosannas on while Captain Craig lay quiet. They might have made him sing by feeding him Till he should work again, but probably Such yielding would have jeopardized the rhythm; They found it more melodious to shout Right on, with unmolested adoration, To keep the tune as it had always been, To trust in God, and let the Captain starve.

He must have understood that afterwards-- When we had laid some fuel to the spark Of him, and oxidized it--for he laughed Out loud and long at us to feel it burn, And then, for gratitude, made game of us: “You are the resurrection and the life,” He said, “and I the hymn the Brahmin sings; O Fuscus! and we’ll go no more a-roving.”

We were not quite accoutred for a blast Of any lettered nonchalance like that, And some of us--the five or six of us Who found him out--were singularly struck. But soon there came assurance of his lips, Like phrases out of some sweet instrument Man’s hand had never fitted, that he felt “No penitential shame for what had come, No virtuous regret for what had been,-- But rather a joy to find it in his life To be an outcast usher of the soul For such as had good courage of the Sun To pattern Love.” The Captain had one chair; And on the bottom of it, like a king, For longer time than I dare chronicle, Sat with an ancient ease and eulogized His opportunity. My friends got out, Like brokers out of Arcady; but I-- May be for fascination of the thing, Or may be for the larger humor of it-- Stayed listening, unwearied and unstung. When they were gone the Captain’s tuneful ooze Of rhetoric took on a change; he smiled At me and then continued, earnestly: “Your friends have had enough of it; but you, For a motive hardly vindicated yet By prudence or by conscience, have remained; And that is very good, for I have things To tell you: things that are not words alone Which are the ghosts of things--but something firmer.

“First, would I have you know, for every gift Or sacrifice, there are--or there may be-- Two kinds of gratitude: the sudden kind We feel for what we take, the slower kind We feel for what we give. Once we have learned As much as this, we know the truth has been Told over to the world a thousand times;-- But we have had no ears to listen yet For more than fragments of it: we have heard A murmur now and then, an echo here And there, and we have made great music of it; And we have made innumerable books To please the Unknown God. Time throws away Dead thousands of them, but the God that knows No death denies not one: the books all count, The songs all count; and yet God’s music has No modes, his language has no adjectives.”

“You may be right, you may be wrong,” said I; “But what has all of this that you say now-- This nineteenth-century Nirvana-talk-- To do with you and me?” The Captain raised His hand and held it westward, where a patched And unwashed attic-window filtered in What barren light could reach us, and then said, With a suave, complacent resonance: “There shines The sun. Behold it. We go round and round, And wisdom comes to us with every whirl We count throughout the circuit. We may say The child is born, the boy becomes a man, The man does this and that, and the man goes,-- But having said it we have not said much, Not very much. Do I fancy, or you think, That it will be the end of anything When I am gone? There was a soldier once Who fought one fight and in that fight fell dead. Sad friends went after, and they brought him home And had a brass band at his funeral, As you should have at mine; and after that A few remembered him. But he was dead, They said, and they should have their friend no more.-- However, there was once a starveling child-- A ragged-vested little incubus, Born to be cuffed and frighted out of all Capacity for childhood’s happiness-- Who started out one day, quite suddenly, To drown himself. He ran away from home, Across the clover-fields and through the woods, And waited on the rock above the stream, Just like a kingfisher. He might have dived, Or jumped, or he might not; but anyhow, There came along a man who looked at him With such an unexpected friendliness, And talked with him in such a common way, That life grew marvelously different: What he had lately known for sullen trunks And branches, and a world of tedious leaves, Was all transmuted; a faint forest wind That once had made the loneliest of all Sad sounds on earth, made now the rarest music; And the water that had called him once to death Now seemed a flowing glory. And that man, Born to go down a soldier, did this thing.-- Not much to do? Not very much, I grant you: Good occupation for a sonneteer, Or for a clown, or for a clergyman, But small work for a soldier. By the way, When you are weary sometimes of your own Utility, I wonder if you find Occasional great comfort pondering What power a man has in him to put forth? ‘Of all the many marvelous things that are, Nothing is there more marvelous than man,’ Said Sophocles; and he lived long ago; ‘And earth, unending ancient of the gods He furrows; and the ploughs go back and forth, Turning the broken mould, year after year.’...

“I turned a little furrow of my own Once on a time, and everybody laughed-- As I laughed afterwards; and I doubt not The First Intelligence, which we have drawn In our competitive humility As if it went forever on two legs, Had some diversion of it: I believe God’s humor is the music of the spheres-- But even as we draft omnipotence Itself to our own image, we pervert The courage of an infinite ideal To finite resignation. You have made The cement of your churches out of tears And ashes, and the fabric will not stand: The shifted walls that you have coaxed and shored So long with unavailing compromise Will crumble down to dust and blow away, And younger dust will follow after them; Though not the faintest or the farthest whirled First atom of the least that ever flew Shall be by man defrauded of the touch God thrilled it with to make a dream for man When Science was unborn. And after time, When we have earned our spiritual ears, And art’s commiseration of the truth No longer glorifies the singing beast, Or venerates the clinquant charlatan,-- Then shall at last come ringing through the sun, Through time, through flesh, God’s music of the soul. For wisdom is that music, and all joy That wisdom:--you may counterfeit, you think, The burden of it in a thousand ways; But as the bitterness that loads your tears Makes Dead Sea swimming easy, so the gloom, The penance, and the woeful pride you keep, Make bitterness your buoyance of the world. And at the fairest and the frenziedest Alike of your God-fearing festivals, You so compound the truth to pamper fear That in the doubtful surfeit of your faith You clamor for the food that shadows eat. You call it rapture or deliverance,-- Passion or exaltation, or what most The moment needs, but your faint-heartedness Lives in it yet: you quiver and you clutch For something larger, something unfulfilled, Some wiser kind of joy that you shall have Never, until you learn to laugh with God.” And with a calm Socratic patronage, At once half sombre and half humorous, The Captain reverently twirled his thumbs And fixed his eyes on something far away; Then, with a gradual gaze, conclusive, shrewd, And at the moment unendurable For sheer beneficence, he looked at me.-- “But the brass band?” I said, not quite at ease With altruism yet.--He made a kind Of reminiscent little inward noise, Midway between a chuckle and a laugh, And that was all his answer: not a word Of explanation or suggestion came From those tight-smiling lips. And when I left, I wondered, as I trod the creaking snow And had the world-wide air to breathe again,-- Though I had seen the tremor of his mouth And honored the endurance of his hand-- Whether or not, securely closeted Up there in the stived haven of his den, The man sat laughing at me; and I felt My teeth grind hard together with a quaint Revulsion--as I think back on it now-- Not only for my Captain, but as well For every smug-faced failure on God’s earth-- Albeit I could swear, at the same time, That there were tears in the old fellow’s eyes. I question if in tremors or in tears There be more guidance to man’s worthiness Than--well, say in his prayers. But oftentimes It humors us to think that we possess By some divine adjustment of our own Particular shrewd cells, or something else, What others, for untutored sympathy, Go spirit-fishing more than half their lives To catch--like cheerful sinners to catch faith; And I have not a doubt but I assumed Some egotistic attribute like this When, cautiously, next morning I reduced The fretful qualms of my novitiate, For most part, to an undigested pride. Only, I live convinced that I regret This enterprise no more than I regret My life; and I am glad that I was born.

That evening, at “The Chrysalis,” I found The faces of my comrades all suffused With what I chose then to denominate Superfluous good feeling. In return, They loaded me with titles of odd form And unexemplified significance, Like “Bellows-mender to Prince Æolus,” “Pipe-filler to the Hoboscholiast,” “Bread-fruit for the Non-Doing,” with one more That I remember, and a dozen more That I forget. I may have been disturbed, I do not say that I was not annoyed, But something of the same serenity That fortified me later made me feel For their skin-pricking arrows not so much Of pain as of a vigorous defect In this world’s archery. I might have tried, With a flat facetiousness, to demonstrate What they had only snapped at and thereby Made out of my best evidence no more Than comfortable food for their conceit; But patient wisdom frowned on argument, With a side nod for silence, and I smoked A series of incurable dry pipes While Morgan fiddled, with obnoxious care, Some things that I detested.--Killigrew, Drowsed with a fond abstraction, like an ass, Lay blinking at me while he grinned and made Remarks. The learned Plunket made remarks.

It may have been for smoke that I cursed cats That night, but I have rather to believe As I lay turning, twisting, listening, And wondering, between great sleepless yawns, What possible satisfaction those dead leaves Could find in sending shadows to my room And swinging them like black rags on a line, That I, with a forlorn clear-headedness Was ekeing out probation. I had sinned In fearing to believe what I believed, And I was paying for it.--Whimsical, You think,--factitious; but “there is no luck, No fate, no fortune for us, but the old Unswerving and inviolable price Gets paid: God sells himself eternally, But never gives a crust,” my friend had said; And while I watched those leaves, and heard those cats, And with half mad minuteness analyzed The Captain’s attitude and then my own, I felt at length as one who throws himself Down restless on a couch when clouds are dark, And shuts his eyes to find, when he wakes up And opens them again, what seems at first An unfamiliar sunlight in his room And in his life--as if the child in him Had laughed and let him see; and then I knew Some prowling superfluity of child In me had found the child in Captain Craig And had the sunlight reach him. While I slept, That thought reshaped itself to friendly dreams, And in the morning it was with me still. Through March and shifting April to the time When winter first becomes a memory My friend the Captain--to my other friend’s Incredulous regret that such as he Should ever get the talons of his talk So fixed in my unfledged credulity-- Kept up the peroration of his life, Not yielding at a threshold, nor, I think, Too often on the stairs. He made me laugh Sometimes, and then again he made me weep Almost; for I had insufficiency Enough in me to make me know the truth Within the jest, and I could feel it there As well as if it were the folded note I felt between my fingers. I had said Before that I should have to go away And leave him for the season; and his eyes Had shone with well-becoming interest At that intelligence. There was no mist In them that I remember; but I marked An unmistakable self-questioning And a reticence of unassumed regret. The two together made anxiety-- Not selfishness, I ventured. I should see No more of him for six or seven months, And I was there to tell him as I might What humorous provision we had made For keeping him locked up in Tilbury Town. That finished--with a few more commonplace Prosaics on the certified event Of my return to find him young again-- I left him neither vexed, I thought, with us, Nor very much at odds with destiny. At any rate, save always for a look That I had seen too often to mistake Or to forget, he gave no other sign.

When I was in the street I heard him shout Some anxious Latin down; but a slow load Of trailing rails absorbed it, and I lost Whatever of good counsel or farewell It may have had for me. I turned about And having waved a somewhat indistinct Acknowledgment, I walked along. The train Was late and I was early, but the gap Was filled and even crowded. Killigrew Had left his pigeonholes to say good-by, And he stood waiting by the ticket window Like one grin-cursed of Orcus.--“You have heard?” Said he.--“Heard what?” said I.--“He! he!” said he; “Then your gray-headed beneficiary-- Your paragon of abstract usefulness-- Your philhellenic proletariat-- He! he!”--“But what the devil is it all About?” said I. “What has he done? What ails him?”-- “What has he done? Ye gods! What has he done? Man, he’s a tramp--a Waggles--a dead beat! I have a friend who knew him fifteen years Ago, and I have his assurance now That your sequestered parasite achieved The same discreet collapse, at intervals, Then as when first you found him. And you ask What he has done! Go find a looking-glass And you may see some recent work of his-- The most remunerative, and I think The most unconscious.” With another man I might have made of that last adjective A stimulating text; but Killigrew Was not the one for me to stimulate In five defective minutes, and I knew it. So I offer no defense for keeping still While he gave birth to phrases for my sake, Nor more for staring at the changeless curve Where river and railroad vanished, half a mile Beyond us to the north. I gave him leave To talk as long as he had words in him, And watched the track and waited for the train; And I remember, when the brakes had ceased Their welcome wheezing and the place was filled With yells and shadows and official smash, How he ground my patient fingers and said, “Well, Good-by, old man!--good-by! And don’t forget: Patrician, but all Waggles to the grave.” The grin became a smile soon after that, And I knew that he had let the Captain go; And I could read, where once the jest had been, The spirit of the friend who cared the most.

The train began to move; and as it moved, I felt a comfortable sudden change All over and inside. Partly it seemed As if the strings of me had all at once Gone down a tone or two; and even though It made me scowl to think so trivial A touch had owned the strength to tighten them, It made me laugh to think that I was free. But free from what--when I began to turn The question round--was more than I could say: I was no longer vexed with Killigrew, Nor more was I possessed with Captain Craig; But I was eased of some restraint, I thought, Not qualified by those amenities, And I should have to search the matter down; For I was young, and I was very keen. So I began to smoke a bad cigar That Plunket, in his love, had given me The night before; and as I smoked I watched The flying mirrors for a mile or so, Till to the changing glimpse, now sharp, now faint, They gave me of the woodland over west, A gleam of long-forgotten strenuous years Came back, when we were Red Men on the trail, With Morgan for the big chief Wocky-Bocky; But I soon yawned out of that and set myself To face again the loud monotonous ride That lay before me like a vista drawn Of bag-racks to the fabled end of things.

Yet that ride had an end, as all rides have; And the days that followed after took the road That all days take,--though never one of them Went by but I got some good thought of it For Captain Craig. Not that I pitied him, Or nursed a mordant hunger for his presence; But what I thought (what Killigrew still thinks) An irremediable cheerfulness Was in him and about the name of him, And I fancy that it may be most of all For the jokes he made that I have saved his letters. I like to think of him, and how he looked-- Or should have looked--in his renewed estate, Composing them. They may be dreariness Unspeakable to you that never saw The Captain; but to five or six of us Who knew him they are not so bad as that. It may be we have smiled not always where The text itself would seem to indicate Responsive titillation on our part,-- Yet having smiled at all we have done well, For we know that we have touched the ghost of him. He tells me that he thinks of nothing now That he would rather do than be himself, Wisely alive. So let us heed this man:--

“The world that has been old is young again, The touch that faltered clings; and this is May. So think of your decrepit pensioner As one who cherishes the living light, Forgetful of dead shadows. He may gloat, And he may not have power in his arms To make the young world move; but he has eyes And ears, and he can read the sun. Therefore Think first of him as one who vegetates In tune with all the children who laugh best And longest through the sunshine, though far off Their laughter, and unheard; for ’tis the child, O friend, that with his laugh redeems the man. Time steals the infant, but the child he leaves; And we, we fighters over of old wars-- We men, we shearers of the Golden Fleece-- Were brutes without him,--brutes to tear the scars Of one another’s wounds and weep in them, And then cry out on God that he should flaunt For life such anguish and flesh-wretchedness. But let the brute go roaring his own way: We do not need him, and he loves us not. Let music be for us the forward song, And let us give the good world one more chance.